Unaitas plans own mobile banking app to lock in revenue

Savings and credit co-operative Unaitas will set up its own mobile banking application as it seeks to lock in revenues that it currently shares with an external vendor.

In a notice on Tuesday, Unaitas called for companies to bid for a contract to provide a mobile application. The firm already has a mobile banking app but wants to set up a new platform which it will own and host for its 400,000 active customers.

This will put an end to the current arrangement where Unaitas uses a third-party application and then shares revenue earned from mobile banking transactions.

“We have been doing revenue sharing with the service provider but we have matured and we feel that we should have (an application) we can host on our own,” Unaitas chief executive Tony Mwangi told the Business Daily.

Mr Mwangi said that he expected the new application to improve efficiency, guaranteeing members higher levels of uptime. Unaitas says that it processes about 7,000 transactions over the mobile money platform per day and the company wants to grow this to about 20,000 before the end of the year.